Water Damage Restoration in Tuscaloosa County

Tuscaloosa is a college town before it is anything else, and tens of thousands of student beds sit empty from May into August. A half-inch line letting go in a closed-up apartment near the Strip is the single most common large loss in this city. Nobody hears it start, and the person who finds it is usually the tenant one floor down.

One county, four kinds of building

The same gallon of water behaves four different ways here. In the purpose-built student blocks it runs flat across a slab and down into the units below. In Dearing Place, Alaca Place and University Circle it drops through board subfloor into a crawl space with heart pine framing over it. In the post-2011 rebuild streets of Alberta, Rosedale and Forest Lake it wicks up the bottom plate of every wall it reaches. In a manufactured home it collects in the belly wrap.

So the first questions on the phone are about the building, not the accident. Slab or piers, one story or three, plaster or drywall, who else shares the structure. Two houses a block apart on the edge of Forest Lake — one rebuilt in 2012, one untouched since 1925 — get different cut heights, different equipment and different schedules for exactly the same failure.

Why the same leak costs more in July than in January

Relative humidity here stays high from May into September, and wet organic material begins growing mold in roughly 24 to 48 hours — at the short end of that range in an Alabama summer. The clock is not really about the water. It is about the temperature and the moisture already in the air around it, both of which are working against you for four months of the year.

July is also when the most housing in this county is empty and when a line of storms is most likely to take the power out for a day or more in Brookwood, Coker or Buhl. A closed building with wet material in it and no air conditioning running is losing ground the whole time. That combination, not the size of the break, is what turns a two-day job into a three-week one.

What happens in the house once the crew is in it

Expect things to be opened. Baseboards get pulled, small holes are drilled low in the wall cavities, cabinet kicks are vented, and anything that will not come back to a dry reading is cut out at a marked line. The cuts are straight and square because someone has to put the wall back, and a ragged opening costs more to close than a clean one.

Expect it to be loud and warm for several days, and expect some visits to end with a meter reading and no equipment at all. Plenty of the calls we take are smaller than the caller feared, and saying so is part of the job. We are also not the plumber and not the roofer — the failure itself gets repaired by whoever you choose, and we work around them.